I love jigsaw puzzles. So imagine my delight when I was delivered an 8000 piece Lego set that would look like the Millenium Falcon (from Star Wars). I immediately set to work, dumping out all of the pieces on the floor (Sorry Mom!) and trying to assemble the thing. I usually just try to figure out puzzles without looking at the box, but this time, I confess, I cheated by looking at the box.

Imagine my surprise when, days later, I had assembled something that looked like the Millenium Falcon only if you squinted properly. It collapsed when I tried to lift it from the floor. I should have realized that the many extra pieces probably served some purpose. As I looked at the wreck of my project, I noticed a sheet of paper that fell out of the box with the pieces. Step-by-step instructions.

In bridge, sometimes we’re so focused on getting to the end product that we miss the step-by-step process. There are steps for bidding, declarer play, and defense.

For defense, the most important step forward is the counting of points. Please, if you want to be a good defender, make sure that when dummy comes down, you start tallying the points between your hand and the dummy. Then divide the rest based on what you know from the auction. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to picture the entire deal easily after only a few cards have been played.

This one step (ok, maybe it's two closely-related steps) will make you a much better defender. Let’s see it in action.

Auction

The Lead

Partner leads the K.

Vul:None Dlr: South	DUMMY Q6 965 J872 AQJ10
Lead: K		YOU K832 82 Q1096 K53

The Play

You play the 2—you don’t like this suit. Partner’s K wins the trick. Now partner leads the 10. You play the 8 and declarer ducks again. Partner plays the Q. You have to discard something. Throwing a spade is a little risky. Diamonds would be very risky. Clubs don’t look promising with that dummy, so let’s throw a low club (we don’t need to signal that we have the K here). We’ll revisit this in a moment. Declarer wins the ace this time. Declarer leads the C2 and partner plays the 9, dummy plays the 10. We win the King. Now what?

The Instruction Manual

We should know where almost all of the high cards are at this point. Declarer has 15-17 (a shortcut is to call this 16 +/- 1), dummy has 10, we have 8. That means partner started with 6+/- 1 (40 total points). We’ve seen 6 points in partner’s hand: the K, Q and J (partner must have the J for this sequence), so they might have a jack remaining.

That information is going to tell us exactly how to play this.

After we win the club trick, playing spades or diamonds will be disastrous with partner out of kings/aces. We should exit with a club! Yes, we’re giving declarer their tricks, but there’s nothing else we can do. If we switch to a diamond or a spade, declarer can take 9 tricks with good guessing. Let’s look at the full deal.

Vul:None Dlr: South	Q6 965 J872 AQJ10
10954 KQJ107 54 94		K832 82 Q1096 K53
	AJ7 A43 AK3 8762

Do you see that winning the club and playing a spade will allow declarer to play low in spades, win the queen, and then finesse your king again later? Playing a diamond works the same way, with declarer playing low from their hand and winning with the J in dummy.

If we exit passively with a club, declarer only has 8 tricks (2 spades, 1 heart, 2 diamonds, and 3 clubs). When declarer cashes clubs, we'll be forced to throw away two spades, but declarer can't get that 9th trick. Sometimes this sort of play is difficult to visualize. If you can't see how it works, grab a deck of cards and play it out with the various possible plays after you exit a club.

Going back to our discard at trick three: Remember when I said our signal doesn’t matter? Partner isn’t about to get in with just their one possible point remaining. Discarding a spade could also be fine unless declarer has 4 of them—the key is to not throw away a diamond as we need to keep parity (the same length) with dummy’s diamonds.